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Purity culture

Rod Dreher sticks his foot in it

Let’s think about Section 8 housing. If word got out that the government was planning to build a housing project for the poor in your neighborhood, how would you feel about it? Be honest with yourself. Nobody would consider this good news. You wouldn’t consider it good news because you don’t want the destructive culture of the poor imported into your neighborhood. Drive over to the poor part of town, and see what a shithole it is. Do you want the people who turned their neighborhood a shithole to bring the shithole to your street?

No, you don’t. Be honest, you don’t.

I don’t recognize these places, existing as they do in Dreher’s mind. The reality? the poor neighborhoods of our city are filled with families working hard to get by.

What is perhaps most irritating about the entire comment is the notion of separation, that of course, we don’t want these folks with their “destructive culture” living next door to us. We are offered a NIMBY response, a repetition of red-lining only with slightly better tools. The consequences are not simply for the poor, but for us as well. Separation, distance makes it possible to tacitly allow injustice to grow in our society, and hardness of heart in ourselves.

At another level, when the talk turns to “shithole” countries or places we are in the realm of a purity culture, a topic that Jonathan Haidt has explored. We must separate from “dirt”, “dirt is to be rejected. It is easy in all this to move from the physical descriptions which Dreher provides, to its metaphorical or political dimension: those from shithole neighborhoods don’t deserve the same respect, protection etc. The American language of race lurks just below the surface, as do any number of anti-homosexual screeds.

And spiritually, what is this concern about purity, but a crossing on the other side of the road? The Kingdom, the good city, this place will be built by mercy, by seeing the neighbor even in the shithole, by recognizing that what is proclaimed in Word, what is seen at the Table, can be shown working together.